According to Nvidia’s internal benchmarking, its Windows 7 driver is much faster than ATI’s. The claims comes from recent testing done with ATI 8.561 drivers modified January 11th 2009 versus NVIDIA 181.65 beta drivers, both tested on the same machine.

Nvidia was happy to report that it wins in the top five games, and in two other games it scores better, as ATI would not even run these games. According to the source Nvidia wins in Call of Duty World at War by a few frames, Call of Duty 4 by more than ten percent. It is slightly faster in Left 4 dead and almost two times faster in Mirror’s Edge. You can probably blame lack of PhysX for ATI, for such a performance lead in this game.  

ATI didn’t want to run Enemy Territory Quake wars and Fallout, which was an instant win for Nvidia. We are quite sure that these drivers will improve for both Nvidia and ATI as there are at least two more quarters until the launch of Windows 7.

The test was conducted at Radeon HD 4850 1GB card versus soon to launch Geforce GTS 250 1GB or should we call it Geforce 9800 GTX+ as this is the name for this card until Tuesday.